New Wireless Monitoring Devices Help to Improve Machine Reliability

Devices that use wireless technology are all around us in the modern world. Whether it be remote setting of your air conditioning in your house, or instructing an Amazon Echo™ to turn on the lights, this technology heralds a new era of providing us with knowledge about our surroundings, and the convenience for managing it.

Knowledge and convenience are two of the key issues when tracking the performance and reliability of your machinery. You want a system that provides detailed information to make decisions about your plant, and the convenience of easy installation and straightforward interfacing. Small battery-powered wifi devices that can be fitted to your machinery in minutes and can provide regular checks for years with no intervention or having to walk round the plant are now finding their way into the mainstream of machine condition monitoring . The WiVib Q series from Icon Research are such devices.

The WiVib Q series of battery-powered wireless monitoring devices provide high resolution spectral data for in-depth condition monitoring of machinery. Such measurements have until recently only been possible using wired accelerometers and data acquisition units installed around the plant, or by walking around with a portable vibration data collector. The WiVib Q series devices can be fitted in minutes using a standard accelerometer mounting and then they communicate instantly via a wireless network with years of life between battery changes. The virtually unlimited expansion capability on standard wifi networks coupled with the use of IOT technology to drive down the price heralds a new era for machine condition monitoring.

There are no compromises in the measurement capabilities of these clever devices. Full spectra of acceleration, velocity and bearing demodulation are available up to 3200 lines resolution. Overall values of all three parameters are also available, together with temperature. Latest MEMS sensing technology is applied to provide large dynamic range and wide bandwidth, up to 20kHz. The bearing demodulation function includes bandpass filtering and enveloping for in-depth bearing analysis.

Different measurement acquisition modes are available. For example, surveillance mode checks the vibration of your machine and only sends back data if the vibration levels are over a prescribed alert/alarm limit. These limits can be automatically set to the ISO10816-1 standard in the support software.

The WiVib Q devices communicate on standard 802.11 b/g/n wireless networks so, in many cases, no additional network infrastructure is required. Just turn it on and watch it link! Full network security is provided.

The internal field-replaceable battery allows operation on timed measurements up to 5 years.

The WiVib Q comes with two supporting software applications. WiVbQScope turns the device into a full featured oscilloscope / spectrum analyser with metric and imperial engineering units, while WiVibTrendQTrend Lite is a feature rich machine condition logging package with large database.